The Problem With Adele

Why are we in such a rush to be nostalgic?

By
Alexandra Molotkow

Dec 10, 2015

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I have to admit something: I don't love Adele. It's not her—she's talented and driven and she makes people happy, and why take a stand against potpourri, or picture frames, or Christmas specials you don't have to watch? I dislike her music for the attitude it promotes. Call it "pre-maturity," or "father-time fetishism": when young people pretend to be ancient. Adele is not old, not even at all, but she sure seems to think she is.

Adele is not old, not even at all, but she sure seems to think she is.

Adele is 27, which means she has two-thirds of her life left to live. She's not a kid anymore; as she's discussed, she has her own kid to worry about now. But there is a difference between not being a kid and being a million. Roughly a million years of difference. Even when Adele's kid is 27, she'll have at least 30 years left in her natural lifespan.

It's not my business how Adele feels about her age, or anything, but her lyrics bother me because they echo the laments of so many Millennials, and I'm sick of the hyperbole. At best, it's un-fun: 25 is the soundtrack to early bedtime proclamations, and one-drink reunions with college friends booked two weeks in advance. At worst, it's irritating, unhelpful, and it obfuscates the bigger issue, which is that most of us in our 20s will never get to get old.

Back then, Broderick blamed his sensitivity on emo, but pointed out that "the cultural difference between generational gaps feels like it's increasing, as the gaps between age decrease." ("I still completely agree," he wrote in an email, "…and if I had to add anything, it's that I feel like an even older not-old person and I completely blame Snapchat.") He mentioned the Beloit College Mindset List, which attempts to illustrate, through brief statements, how an incoming college student might see the world. For the Class of 2018, for instance, "Hell has always been associated less with torment and more with nothingness." Also, "'press pound' on the phone is now translated as 'hit hashtag,'" which I can confirm: the other day, my 23-year-old roommate asked if one was the other.

Later, he came into the living room while I was listening to "You Oughta Know" and asked if I was watching a movie. "No, this is the album," I said, adding, "it came out when you were three," before it dawned on me what an ass I was being. What difference does it make? Jagged Little Pill was there when he was a kid, just as it was for me. It freaks me out to think Alanis was 21 at the time of its release, but then Keats wrote "On Death" at 19. And it trips me out to think that some of my most vivid memories were formed before I knew about the Internet, but that just means I remember a lot, which feels powerful.

Of course you feel old. I feel old. We all live in a strange time warp that is nearly impossible to make sense of if you weren't born into it.

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The world is changing rapidly even while it mostly looks the same, with some uncanny differences: kids wear the same things they did when we were kids, and listen to the same music, except all at once plus more. Kids are more empowered to make their own culture, and their culture is ubiquitous even while it's harder for olds to know "what the kids are up to" — they speak in an encrypted language that morphs faster than you can learn it. When I was a preteen, culture came in sets of references, with which you allied yourself by mastering them. By the time I turned 25 it was a reference free-for-all, and now I communicate with my friends partly in bite-size memes with the life spans of mosquitoes. It still means something, but it moves so fast, and if you fall behind it feels much, much harder to catch up.

In the face of this onslaught—new terms, new fads, new personalities born on platforms you barely know how to use—it feels good to say, I'm out: I'm old now, with different priorities, and none of this has to matter to me anymore. But it does. To complain of getting old is a form of wishful worry. The eternal truth is that you will have to keep living until you're dead; the modern reality is that you will also have to stay relevant.

The eternal truth is that you will have to keep living until you're dead; the modern reality is that you will also have to stay relevant.

The same Millennials who worry incessantly about being too old at 30 will likely be working well into their senior years. We have high levels of debt and unemployment, low levels of savings, and little hope of retirement support to carry us into repose—the economic realities cut deeper for people born into less wealth to begin with, as well as for people of color. The job market is so technology driven that we'll need to stay "up" on things well past the age at which many of us would rather say "fuck it." In that way, 25's relentless nostalgia offers a fantasy: it covers a jagged sense of anxiety with a downy comforter of sad. The hard part about being 27 isn't the mudslide unto death, but the fact of staring down a (hopefully) long life, with a little less optimism than when you were 19.

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It's true that it's harder to drink yourself half to death at 27 and still function the next day, or to meet people to casually sleep with without the added effort of swiping a finger. Age brings a new set of concerns, ideally ones beyond your immediate gratification. That doesn't mean your glory days are over—where was that off-ramp, exactly?—it just means you have to try a little harder to not die. I remember 21 as confusing, painful, and awkward: I had some idea of who I was, but no idea how to be around others. I did too much of the wrong substances and found sex either boring or scary. Fun is a little bit scarcer now, but much funner on the whole.

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It's not so tragic to not be a kid anymore; life is harder, but richer on the "other side" of one of many sides in a lifetime. There are plenty of reasons to fear the future, but reasons to be excited for it, too; pining too much for the past feels like a waste of energy. There is plenty of room between very young and ancient—best to embrace the many years we'll spend neither dying nor learning how to live.

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